Congo War Widens as Angolan Jets Bomb Rebel Stronghold

Angolan jets streaked deep into this huge Central African country and bombed its third-largest city Tuesday, apparently targeting Ugandan troops sent to bolster Congolese rebels in a growing regional war.

The battle at Kisangani, the rebel-held river port about 770 miles northeast of this capital, opened a new front in the 3-week-old conflict. It came after forces from Angola and Zimbabwe helped President Laurent Kabila’s poorly equipped army stop an advance on Kinshasa by rebel forces, which are led by Congolese Tutsis backed by troops from Uganda and Tutsi-ruled Rwanda.

Rebel leaders said air raids in support of Kabila struck homes in Kisangani and a string of villages south of Kinshasa, killing hundreds of civilians. The claim could not be confirmed, but the conflict was clearly taking an ugly turn.

Kabila, wearing a brown cowboy hat, returned in a buoyant mood to Kinshasa after spending nine days in the southern city of Lubumbashi and appealed for vengeance against minority Tutsis, whom he accuses of trying to annex territory and create a multinational “empire” in Africa’s Great Lakes region.

“The people must be completely mobilized,” Kabila said, urging civilians to take up arms, including arrows and spears, to “crush the enemy. . . . Otherwise, we will become slaves of the Tutsis.”

Rebels raided a Roman Catholic mission crowded with Congolese refugees Sunday and killed 37 people, including a priest, three nuns and a seminary student, the Vatican’s missionary news service Fides reported. The rebels suspected that the mission, in the village of Kasika near the Rwandan border, had given food to a pro-government militia, Fides said.

Central Africa lives in the shadow of the 1994 slaughter by extremist ethnic Hutus of more than 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda. The Rwandan Tutsis subsequently seized power in that nation and have been meddling in neighboring Congo ever since, trying to secure the border and deprive Hutu militias of sanctuary.

Kabila has been whipping up ethnic hatred against Tutsis since the rebellion began Aug. 2. Human rights organizations say thousands of Tutsis have been rounded up and beaten.

But it was Tuesday’s Ugandan ground advance and Angolan air attack on Kisangani that most alarmed government officials in the region. It was the first direct clash between any of the four foreign armies skirmishing in Africa’s third-largest country.

Uganda, like Rwanda, has not formally acknowledged its troop deployment in Congo, but residents along the border reported seeing Ugandan tanks and troops cross the border this week.

Reports from Kisangani, which fell to Congolese rebels Sunday, were sketchy. A spokesman for Kabila said Congolese units were clashing with Ugandan troops sent to reinforce the rebels. Business sources reached by telephone said a Ugandan army column was the apparent target of Tuesday’s bombing.

Bizima Karaha, who was Kabila’s foreign minister before joining the insurgency as a spokesman, said Zimbabwean as well as Angolan jets were bombing Kisangani.

“There were no military objectives,” Karaha said. “All they are doing is sending planes and throwing bombs indiscriminately. They cannot recapture Kisangani, only bomb it from the air. This is terrorism.”

Parks Mankahlana, a spokesman for South African President Nelson Mandela, called it “a very dangerous situation.” Mandela is trying to negotiate a cease-fire in Congo’s second international conflict in as many years.

The armed scramble over Congo is rooted not only in its neighbors’ security concerns but also in Congo’s inability to establish democracy, economic well-being or an infrastructure to control its vast, mineral-rich territory, which borders nine nations.

Kabila, an obscure guerrilla of Marxist leaning, deposed longtime dictator Mobutu Sese Seko 15 months ago with help from some of the same elements of the Rwandan, Ugandan and Congolese armies that are now trying to depose him. Rwanda and Uganda accuse him of failing, as Mobutu did, to halt insurgents’ attacks on their territories from Congo’s eastern mountains.

Mandela, aided by the United States and a U.N. special envoy, has also tried to broker talks between Mobutu’s collapsing government and Kabila’s rebellion. Mandela’s task is even harder this time because the West is staying on the sidelines--frustrated, say some Africa specialists, by Congo’s chronic corruption and infighting.

The latest revolt began when Tutsis in Kabila’s army seized several cities along Congo’s northeastern borders with Rwanda and Uganda. They quickly moved hundreds of troops on hijacked airliners more than 1,000 miles west to the Atlantic coast and began moving up the Congo River toward Kinshasa.

Fleeing to Lubumbashi, about 1,000 miles southeast of the capital, Kabila appealed for outside help. More than 2,000 troops from Angola and 600 from Zimbabwe began arriving late last week and have trapped rebel forces in western Congo between the coast and the capital, seizing the insurgents’ coastal supply base.

Without an air force of his own, Kabila also got help from Zimbabwe’s air force commander, who came to Kinshasa to direct a campaign by Angolan and Zimbabwean pilots. Their MIG fighter jets and helicopter gunships have been attacking the rebels south of the capital since Monday.

Karaha, the rebel spokesman, said the beleaguered insurgents halted their advance 19 miles south of Kinshasa, claiming they were heeding Mandela’s call Sunday for a cease-fire.

By Tuesday, rebels on the western front controlled little more than the huge dam at Inga, 135 miles from the capital, that supplies Kinshasa’s electricity. For the ninth evening in a row, they cut off power.